Recently I saw an enquiry from someone who wanted to repost an interesting article in a Facebook page but was worried about the legal implications. Here’s a summary of the main issues as I understand them. As an author, editor and researcher, it’s a subject that both interests and worries me: not only in terms of asserting my own rights to the material I create, but also of avoiding infringement of the rights of others.
In today’s interconnected world, most of us are to some extent authors and publishers, and the apparent transience of material that appears briefly on a blog or on Facebook and then fades from memory is actually an illusion. Anything that makes it to the internet, whether it’s a web site, a photograph or sound file, or a one-line email, takes on a life of its own. Even when the originator deletes it, the chances are that there’s a copy of it somewhere out there in the cloud. In principle, someone still owns it – unless it meets one of the conditions I’ll discuss below – but that doesn’t mean its ownership is known.
Copyright and social media
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